This volume, originating from a Leiden University Ph.D. dissertation (2010), offers a metapoetical reading of one of the most famous myths of classical antiquity: the tale of the boy Hylas. This episode from the Argonauts' voyage narrates how Hylas, Heracles' companion, sets out to fetch water during a stopover of the ship Argo in Mysia and was abducted by the Nymphs of the spring, never to return, leaving Heracles in despair. It was so famous in antiquity as to justify Virgil's rhetorical question: cui non dictus Hylas puer? (G. 3.6). The story was recounted by many Hellenistic and Roman poets, from Apollonius of Rhodes to Theocritus, from Propertius to Valerius Flaccus and Statius – to mention but the most important.
The main thesis of the book is that Hylas' tale was used by Hellenistic and Roman poets ‘as a vehicle to express their ideas about poetry and to react to those of others’ (p. 4). Certain elements of the story functioned as poetic metaphors and were used by different authors in order to develop individual post-Homeric poetic personae and to reflect symbolically on the position of their poetry within the literary tradition. In particular, it is argued that Apollonius of Rhodes and Theocritus contrast the boy Hylas with Heracles, the traditional ‘strong’ hero, and thus the symbol of epic poetry par excellence, in order to express their adherence to new poetic principles, labelled as ‘Callimachean’ by H., since Callimachus was the most important – and the most self-conscious – representative of the new Hellenistic aesthetics. Roman poets then approached Hylas as a vehicle of ‘Callimachean’ poetics and adapted this figure to suit their own literary agendas.
The real novelty of the book, and its intrinsic methodological value, consists in its diachronical approach to problems concerning intertextuality and poetological allegories. While the intertextual connections between individual passages of the Hylas tale in its various literary versions had already been explored, building on his predecessors' analyses, H. offers a metapoetical reading of the whole myth, which is partly suggested by the very etymology of the name Hylas, deriving from ὕλη, ‘wood’, but also ‘(poetic) subject matter’ – an etymology exploited by most of the poets dealing with the subject. H. shows how earlier interpretations of the myth were discussed, incorporated into new contexts, challenged and reappropriated, in an intertextual dialogue bringing into play not just the individual text, but the whole literary history of Hylas.
H. is to be commended for handling a complex subject matter in an accessible way: the writing is clear, and the arguments well presented. All the Greek and Latin passages are translated into English, so that the book might be of interest not only to classicists, but also to anyone more generally concerned with metapoetics.
The introduction sets out very clearly the scope of the investigation and its methodological approach. Since the Hylas poems all adhere to a ‘Callimachean’ aesthetics, albeit each in its own way, Callimachus' ideas and their reception in Rome are introduced in a brief, yet very effective and bibliographically informed survey, which may be profitably read by both students and scholars in search of a good overview of this vast topic. At the core of the book (pp. 22–153) are the four chapters respectively devoted to Apollonius of Rhodes (Chapter 1), Theocritus (Chapter 2), Propertius (Chapter 3), Valerius Flaccus and Statius (Chapter 4). In what follows I will try to summarise H.’s main points, in order to give the reader a general account of the richness of his analyses.
H. argues that Apollonius of Rhodes, the singer of a new, post-Homeric epic, associates himself with Hylas, as opposed to Heracles, the traditional epic hero, who is significantly left behind at the end of the first book of the Argonautica. Hylas' ‘emancipation’ from Heracles and his ‘marriage’ to a nymph symbolise the ‘maturation’ of the author as an epic poet, his negotiation of his own position in the literary tradition. Heracles – and thus the old epic poetry he embodies – is still considered a model and teacher, but, at the same time, he is superseded by an alternative heroic paradigm, symbolised by Jason, the new epic hero, the mise en abyme of Apollonius himself and of his identity as an epic author vis-à-vis Homer.
Reacting to his contemporary Apollonius, Theocritus makes Hylas the emblem of the bucolic poet. In Idyll 13, the gradual maturation and transformation of Hylas is used to illustrate the origin and development of a new bucolic poetry. It is worth noting that, in examining the intertextual relationship between Apollonius and Theocritus, H. does not try to establish any relative chronology for their works, but accepts the sensible approach – followed by many Hellenistic scholars nowadays – that the poets working in Alexandria in the third century b.c. were aware of each other's work in progress.
In Rome, Theocritus' metapoetical allegory is taken up by Propertius in 1.20, modelled on Idyll 13. The premise for a complex poetological reading of the text is the (widely accepted) identification of the Gallus in love with a boy, the addressee of the poem, with Cornelius Gallus, the elegiac poet. Hylas is seen as the symbol of Gallus' Amores, which must be ‘protected’ against Virgil's appropriation (as Eclogues 2 and 10 – to which Propertius alludes in this poem – make clear, Virgil, alluding to Gallus' Amores, incorporated the elegiac into the bucolic). The Hylas of Theocritus is thus turned into a symbol of elegiac poetry, while Heracles becomes the emblem of the elegiac lover in pursuit of an unattainable object of affection.
Valerius Flaccus' interpretation of the story determines his position with regard to the epic tradition, in particular Virgil's Aeneid, the Roman Iliad. Just as in Apollonius' Argonautica the Hylas myth foreshadowed the transition from an initially ‘Iliadic’ atmosphere, where there was still some place for Heracles, to a new epic, characterised by different values, here it serves as a prefiguration of the central role played by Medea's elegiac love and thus contributes to the characterisation of Valerius' Argonautica as an ‘elegized’ Aeneid. Just as Homer was still a model for Apollonius, who nevertheless found his own poetic niche in the epic tradition, so Valerius follows Virgil to a certain extent, but then departs from his model, exploiting the elegiac tradition. The departure of Heracles from Valerius' Argonautica is, as in Apollonius, the symbol of a new epic, set in contrast to the traditional heroic poem.
Statius devotes only four lines to the Hylas myth in his Thebaid (5.441–4). Through an allusion to Valerius, he uses Hylas and Heracles to allegorically describe the relation between his Thebaid and the Aeneid. H.’s metapoetical reading of this passage is particularly interesting in methodological terms, since it shows how the whole metapoetical tradition of the Hylas myth sheds light on its individual manifestations.
The book ends with a brief conclusion, notes to the chapters and a bibliography, followed by a general index and an index locorum.
All in all, by means of a case study, the work clarifies the workings of metapoetics in classical antiquity, offering stimulating reflections on the intertextual dialogue among poets living in very different contexts, from the Hellenistic age to the Flavian era. H. succeeds in setting up a new diachronic approach that might function as a fruitful model for future investigations of ancient metapoetics.
There are very few typos, mostly of a trivial nature (e.g. ἁλος for ἁλός twice at the end of p. 30; μῆκός for μῆκος on p. 42; Thryrsis for Thyrsis on p. 76; ἐδιδασκε for ἐδίδασκε on p. 80; on p. 177 n. 119, AP 12.217 is wrongly attributed to Meleager, when it is by Strato of Sardis).
